


a many splendored thing

by kenopsia (indie)



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Aromanticism, Asexuality, Everyone is Ace, F/M, Is what I'm saying, Long-Distance Relationship, M/M, Multi, Not all relationships are wrapped up neatly, Polyamory, Sexting, Sexual Identity, Shades of Grey-A, but for the most part, sexual identity confusion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-17
Updated: 2016-08-17
Packaged: 2018-08-09 07:05:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,977
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7791646
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/indie/pseuds/kenopsia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The hockey house has a bit of a reputation. It’s bullshit, of course. Most reputations are. <i>Or,</i> the one where all your faves are ace.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a many splendored thing

**Author's Note:**

  * For [TwoMenAndAGuava (drakkynfyre47)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/drakkynfyre47/gifts).



> For TwoMenAndAGuava, who wanted any of the CP pairings up for nom, so long as there was no explicit sex and Lardo got to bond with R&H. I went a bit wild and saw "any pairings" and decided to go "all pairings." Oops. ;)

The hockey house has a bit of a reputation. It’s bullshit, of course. Most reputations are.

*

It was almost easier away from the near constant weight of Shitty’s aggressive nudity. Larissa felt guilty even thinking it, but that didn’t make it any less true.

She loves Shitty: as a bro and as a romantic possibility. With him at Harvard, that last part was isn’t as difficult to admit. Not as easy as it would have been if he’d been a law student in, say, Japan, but easier than it had been when he’d been pantsless in proximity of her. She knows she's probably throwing him off kilter, flirtier now and more affectionate than she's ever been when the two of them are in close proximity. 

 _i fcking love you back,_ she types.

*

At one point when Nursey was at Andover, Shitty Knight was still going by his first name.

Back then, Shitty had yet to perfect the constant performance art of his personality, the moving cogs and unique topography of traits that make it somehow okay for him to climb into someone’s personal space with his dick flopping around in the wind.

So it was more than a little bit of a shock that during Nursey’s freshman year at Samwell, Nursey was privy to a half-dressed Shitty in someone’s personal space a whopping eight times in the altogether, and easily a dozen more with him in an outfit shy of full frontal nudity.

No one ever accused Shitty of being a tease, or slutty, because no one ever assumed that Shitty had actual intentions of using his dick, flopping in the wind as it was.

What Nursey can’t figure out is, with Shitty gone now, how the hell he’s supposed to inherit his mantle.

*

“Larissa was wearing fresh eyeliner today.” Ransom says, a little after the school year starts.

“You called a secret best friends meeting tonight because L’s makeup is on point today?”

“No, but it’s been the latest in a string of days where she puts on fresh eyeliner.” 

“We are seniors now,” Holster says, dubiously. “Fresh year, fresh start?”

“That doesn’t really seem like her.”

“Okay, or maybe there’s a new girl she’s trying to wheel.”

“I’ve never actually heard her say she’s a lesbian, Holster.”

“You’re right, but the circumstantial evidence is...”

“Oh my God,” Ransom laughs, wedging his thigh between Holster’s legs from behind, and curling an arm around the narrow point of his waist. “This secret best friends meeting is so over.”

“Alright,” Holster agrees, with one arm bent under his head and dropping the other to rest on Ransom’s forearm in front of him. “But I’ll keep an eye on her.”

*

Caitlin Farmer has, in the space of one semester, become the kind of person who’s phone is always on silent. At all times, but especially on road trips.

Which hasn’t, historically speaking, been the case. This year she’s missed a lot of calls.

This can mainly be traced back to a single incident where Caitlin dozed off on the bus, and woke up to four girls crowded onto one narrow row behind her to read the stream of her texts with Chris. Lana was literally biting the meat of her own hand, teeth set into the meat at the base of her thumb.

“This is,” Crystal said, and Caitlin felt simultaneously massively embarrassed and being a little proud.

“I know,” she says, feeling herself go pink, and kneeling backwards to face the girls behind her.

“He’s like —” Lana says, still hiding the bottom of her face behind her wrist.

“ _I know._ ” Which felt awesome to say. Caitlin’s never been a Cool Girl. She was a walk-on player at the beginning of preseason. She rarely gets left behind because of the travel limitations (and with an eighteen girl roster, three of them inevitably do) but she’s hardly the best. The girls like her well enough, but she met Chris during a freshman mixer during the first week of athletic conditioning and that, well. That was a lot of her social life sorted. It doesn’t help that she’s not crazy about drinking.

Now though. “We weren’t sure you were hooking up with him.”

Caitlin feels her previous excitement about their attention cool a notch. It’s like, _shit,_ does everything come down to that? She doesn’t want to go into her private life, and she doesn’t want them to think Chris isn’t cool or sexy, and she doesn’t want to out herself. God, this whole thing is so embarrassing. She affects a smirk and gives a little shrug, lunging for her phone.

And then, after that, it just tends to be on silent. Not even vibrate, because, some things you keep close to your chest.

Some things, like the fact that your adorable, kind, enthusiastic, ridiculous boyfriend is the world's best sexter. It's almost quantifiable. He's just got this exquisite brain, somehow both sexy and funny and weird, and he's well punctuated and includes dialogue and weird asides and _backstory._

When Chris is done with hockey, he clearly has a second career ready in the wings as an erotic novelist.

*

“Larissa,” Holster says, letting his thumb hover near her eye. He doesn’t touch. “That’s different.”

“I know,” she says, feeling shy, suddenly.

“Sorry,” Holster smiles at her. “I didn’t mean to make you feel weird.”

“It’s okay. I was skyping with Shitty, earlier,” she admits, because she and Holster have been getting closer with the dynamics of the haus in flux.  

“Oh,” Holster says. “I always got the impression that that was a one way street.”

Lardo picks at the hem of her skirt. “It’s not.”

“Do you want to talk about it?” he asks.

“Yeah, but after, like, nine beers?”

“It’s a date,” Holster says, and heads to the fridge.

Several beers in and Holster and Lardo has painted Holster’s nails and has moved on to her own toes. “Okay so, like, I love Shitty,” she says, leaning over to sip her drink through a straw so she doesn’t have to stop painting.

“God that’s beautiful,” Holster says, his own drink held between his palms with his fingers flexed outwards to keep them safe. “Did you figure it out over the summer?”

Lardo frowns. “I’ve always known. I just. It’s always easier over the summer. And then it gets tough during the school year again.”

Holster blinks. “Because … no one has enough free time to think about romance during the school year?”

Lardo snorts. “Because his dick is always out. And it throws me off. How is a girl supposed to suggest that a college boy enter into an exclusive and nonsexual relationship with her when it’s always there.”

“Oh Lardo,” he says, pulling her to him.

“Stop,” she squeals, “you’re going to get polish everywhere.”

He lets her pull back but hooks an arm around her shoulder, presses his face against her temple.

Later, Holster has queued a show on his laptop for background noise, and has her bundled to his chest, one enormous hand in her hair. She’s not going to cry about it, she’s made of tougher stuff than that, but it is a massive relief to bury herself in the broad expanse of Holster’s chest. “I don’t know how you do it,” she mumbles.

“Communication. It’d make you sick to be privy to our constant secret meetings. You need to talk to your boy.”

“I don’t want to,” she says. “It’s easier to just flirt with him when he’s not here.”

“But that’s not the grown up thing to do.”

“Liz Lemon would eat Cheesy Blasters for every meal and you love her.”

“Yes,” Holster says, nuzzling in. “But you’re not a scripted comedy. You need to talk to Shitty. Because we’ve all known how he feels about you. But that other stuff — what you want to do or don’t want to do. You’re going to have to discuss it.”

“He’s not going to want  — and I know _I_ don’t want,” Lardo starts.

“Well. It’s up to you to make that decision. Together. You can’t just decide what Shitty will or won’t want and flirt with him when you think his dick is too far away to plausibly try to get to you.”

“Ugh. When the fuck did you become such an emotionally mature grown up. What happened to my house full of frat boys?”

“You made us brush our hair and to all those events that needed ties. And Shitty made us go to all those DSR nights. If anything, he’s going to be super prepared with the vocabulary to have that conversation with you.”

Lardo groans into his chest, her own heart thumping wildly, because he isn’t wrong, but it doesn’t make it any easier.

*

Caitlin Farmer comes out as ace to the internet before anyone else. She runs a tumblr about sports girl aesthetics, talks a lot about college athletes and up and writes up little bios on the game to be watching, spends a lot of time talking about women’s soccer and the fact that those girls make minimum wage.

It’s just — it’s so easy on the internet. She’s got 615 followers at last count, less if you’re willing to comb through and count the various porn and spambots, but she isn’t. Of course, a lot of them are lesbians, because that’s admittedly the demographic that’s frequently as into female athletics as she is.

It made everything confusing for a long time, because she’d found tumblr at a formative age, and found herself in a place where it was cool to prioritize women, and she loves women, their friendship and their shapes, and it would have been easier if she’d had some cheat sheet, some clear cut lust to help her check off her internal boxes. Lesbian, bisexual, pan?

She sorts one thing at a time, though. She lets them know at seventeen that she thinks she might be ace. It only causes one round of _Discourse,_ which she shamelessly side-steps, because it’s not her responsibility to respond to people’s unnecessary input about her sexuality.

A year after that, she lets her followers know that she’s got a boyfriend and he is A+ so she probably isn’t a lesbian, although she hasn't rules out being a WLW. That starts a discourse, too, but she just turns off asks for a while and spams everyone with Venus and Serena for a week until the dust settles.

*

 

*

Nursey almost texts Shitty about it a dozen times, but can’t think of a non-idiotic way to say “Hey man you remember when you used to climb into teammates’ beds for a snuggle? Turns out I’m really interested in that, too. How do I become the team’s nonsexual mascot?”

He’s not lonely, he has a whole team, and the parts of the poli-sci department that he gets along with, and the people in his creative nonfiction workshop.

There’s a hierarchy, though, and it goes: lovers and romantic partners, best friends, friends. The whole thing is fucking idiotic. Casey from workshop got herself a girlfriend and all of the sudden she doesn’t think they should see movies together. It doesn’t make any sense to him that romance is so much more important than friendship, that he loses all of the people he likes spending time with because they want to have sex with other people.

“You make a lot of time for Holster,” he says, off-handedly one day, the two of them lingering a little longer than everyone else, because Dex has a comp-sci study group right after practice and Ransom is his closest counterpart, so Nursey had asked him if he wanted to help him out for a minute.

Random does a quick crossover and puts the puck in the practice net. “What? Bro, of course I do.”

“Right,” Nursey nods. “Bros before hoes. Or, like, bros on the same shelf as hoes.”

Ransom sticks him in the chest, one quick jab. “One — not cool. Two — how do you not know that Holtz is my boyfriend?”

Nursey is so thrown off balance figuratively that he literally ends up on his ass. “What?”

Ransom extends one gloved hand and pulls Nursey up. “I mean, isn’t it obvious?”

“No, it is _not._ You’ve got a girlfriend.” Nursey says.

“Uh. Yeah. I mean, it’s more that _we_ have a girlfriend? And she has two boyfriends?”

“Huh,” Nursey says. It feels, somehow, even worse, that he’s lost one of his shining examples of people who stay intimate with the friends they aren’t dating after they get into a relationship. He swallows his rising nausea. Says, “Well, that’s cool.”

*

Chowder is the easiest mark, a soft touch, if Nursey can forgive himself for making the pun. When Nursey wants to get his head scratched or to sit close to someone guaranteed not to discretely inch out of his space, his feet take him of their own volition to Chowder’s room.

“Long day?” Chowder asks, lifting his X-Box controller so Nursey can sink down and put his head on Chowder’s knee.

“You have no idea,” Nursey groans. Chowder finishes his game before he takes his headset off, queues up music from his hard drive on the X-Box and gives Nursey his full attention, which is all Nursey really wants.

Chowder is in a committed relationship; the fact is not lost on Nursey. Perhaps, he has thought, a little deviously, that’s the secret. He could pair up everyone on the team with someone else and then no one would be threatened by the fact that he wants to pet them and be petted in return.

Except: the fly in the ointment. Very few people are like Chowder, who always has time for everything he finds important, friends and his girl and hockey and video games and his coursework and baking with Bitty. He knows other people who get together and suddenly have a rapid reprioritizing. Not everyone is like Chowder, who seems to have infinite social energy, or Ransom, who schedules his girlfriend where she fits around hockey and doesn’t mind if his best friend third-wheels on all of them.

Chowder is like Chowder, though, so Nursey will take what he can get.

“Hey Chris,” Dex says, showing up uninvited like some kind of hell spawn when he isn't invited, Nursey thinks, unfairly.

However, because in his heart he’s still a scene kid piece of shit from 2005, he sings “you were our only friend,” into Chowder’s knee.

“Oh, sorry,” Dex says. “I didn't realize you had company.”

“Don't be ridiculous,” Chowder says. “You can both be my company.”

Dex looks unsure in the doorway. “Come on, Dex, you know we share Chowder.”

Dex makes himself comfortable on the other side of Chowder. “What are you guys up to?”

“I had plans after my workshop but I got blown off, so I thought I’d go see my buddy Chowder,” Nursey says. Chowder smiles down at him, putting his hands in his hair.

“I’m going to go out to karaoke with Cait later,” Chowder says. “You’re both welcome to come, but you’ll both have to do a song with me.”

Nursey and Dex made uneasy eye contact. It was a strange angle, with Nursey’s head still in Chowder’s lap, but they managed to convey a message between the two of them, and both of them know they don’t _want_ to go to a karaoke event by any stretch of the imagination, but they’ve both dropped in on Chowder independently because of his track record as an _extraordinary_ bro.

“Oh man,” Nursey says, haltingly.

“That sounds— ” Dex says.

They’re obviously both floundering. Chowder is starting to smirk a little, and Nursey thinks, _fuck it._ “We’d love to come, Chow.”

Dex’s jaw falls open and then snaps shut. He flashes Nursey _a look_ that he probably fancies intimidating. Nursey flutters his eyelashes at him.

“Great!” Chowder beams, scraping the clipped blunts of his nails through Nursey’s hair. This is going to be so much fun.  

*

Ransom and Holster call a team meeting before any of them are allowed to head out on their weekend plans. There is a whiteboard present.

“This is going to be good,” Bitty says. He brings a bag of apples into the living room with a knife and a bowl so he can peel them during the discussion. There are chairs in the living room arranged in a circle like they’re about to have a socratic seminar. The whiteboard says _SEXUALITY SHIT WITH RANSOM & HOLSTER _

“It has come to my attention,” Ransom says, “that there are some of you that don’t know Holster is my boyfriend.”

The room dissolves into chaos. “What the fuck, you guys, we have _date night._ How is this news to anyone here?”

“Okay, wait, though,” Bitty says, “you’ve had date night since before I moved in.”

Holster snorts. “Um. Because we’ve been dating since before you moved in here? And why did you just air quote around _date night?_ ”

“Because it seemed like an air quote date night.” Bitty says archly. “And what about March?”

“She’s my boyfriend’s girlfriend? Also my girlfriend? We’re either dating or dating in-laws. Haven’t you ever seen Parks?” Holster explains.

“You used to get really upset when — ” Bitty says, and then stops himself, little saucer eyes getting even more round after. “Sorry, nothing, nevermind.”

Ransom cuts his eyes at Holster, mouthing something. Holster shakes his head frantically in an obvious _not now._ Nursey might spontaneously combust with curiosity. “Bros! Shut the fuck up, please,” Holster says eventually, “so we can get the fuck through this slideshow and y’all can start your weekends.”

Ransom writes down, _Sexual and Romantic Attraction._

“So for a lot of people these two things go together. Wanting to be in a relationship with women and have sex with women, or with men, or with nonbinary people, or with all of the above. Whatever,” Holster says. “And that’s awesome, because the balance of probabilities is that you’re going to find someone who, likewise, and set off on a relatively uncomplicated ride into the sunset, at least on the issue of sexual and romantic compatibility.”

“As someone who wants to have sex and relationships with men and women, this is easy for me.”

“As a biromantic ace,” Holster adds, “it was hard for me, until I figured out I was also poly, na getting into a poly relationship was a way to take some of the strain at first, but then turned out to be rewarding in itself.”

Chowder is very enthusiastically sitting on the edge of his seat, looking stupidly interested. Dex is frowning in his own chair.

Nursey has his fingers in his mouth for the duration of the lecture. 

*

Karaoke turns out not to be that bad. Caitlin and Chowder are nauseating together, in a good way, and climb into the booth on the opposite side as Nursey and Dex. “God,” she says, her fingers curling affectionately under the collar of Chowder’s shirt. “They gave a whole talk about romantic and sexual attraction being in sync privilege?”

“It was pretty great,” Chowder says.

“That’s so _men of tumblr,_ ” she says. 

“What?” Dex says. Nursey knows what she means, but Dex seems more like a reddit guy.

“Tumblr is like,” Caitlin says, “this place where people are always, like, sexuality detectives. There’s a lot of collective energy devoted to thinking about that sort of thing.”

“Also, feminism,” Chowder says. Caitlin tips her head towards him in acknowledgelemt.

“Anyways. I wish I’d been there.”

“I’m sure Bitty livetweeted significant portions of it.” Nursey says, and Cait whips out her phone to check.

“Okay, but only in a vaguetweeting way,” she says, eyes on her screen, absently reading off parts of several tweets. “Nothing quite like a Haus meeting. Our caps are always informative, tmi y'all, oh hey one in four definitely more.”

By the time their food hits the table, Chowder has made Dex and Nursey do a song with him (500 Miles) and Caitlin and Chowder have done a song so well rehearsed that Nursey suspects that they’ve done it before. (1000 Miles)

Conversation flows easily, and at some point Dex forgets to look like he’s sucking lemons and Nursey can feel his own knee kind of fall towards him until it rests there against the side of Dex’s thigh. Dex turns pink, still looking at Caitlin while she’s talking, and put his hand on Nursey’s angled knee, on the inside. 

When the two of them go back up (Somehow it doesn’t surprise him that Chowder knows every word of Will Smith’s Miami) Nursey leans in. “Do you want to get out of here before they make us sing another song?”

There’s a card reader at the table, which Nursey slides to himself, ignoring Dex’s protests, and they make their excuses when Chowder and Caitlin get back.

*

“What was Bitty talking about, that made you upset?” Ransom demands, when the house is quiet.

“We’ve already talked about it,” Holster says, his throat getting tight. “He’s talking about when you guys were still sneaking around. Like — that time you had a quiz in the morning and you locked me out.”

“Aw, fuck, Hols,” Ransom says, pulling him to his chest and kissing him on the forehead.

 _Sneaking around_ is probably a poor choice of words. It’s not like Holster hadn’t known about March from the first date (which he was on) but there had been a while where they had thought it a great kindness to be particularly sneaky about when they were having sex.

Holster doesn’t want to be part of the festivities, exactly, but he sure as fuck doesn’t want to be pointedly excluded. And it _definitely_ hadn’t been fair to sexile him in his own relationship when he would have been just as happy watching TV from the top bunk and popping popcorn when they were done, which is more or less what they do now when Ransom and March want to get off.

“I love you so much, Adam. That was a shitty bro move of me, and a shitty boyfriend thing to do.”

“That was so long ago,” Holster says, relishing in the radiant heat of Ransom’s arms. “I love you. I love our girlfriend. You should call her and see if she wants to come watch The Blair Witch Project.”

*

Nursey and Dex leave before Caitlin and Chowder, but they take longer to get back to Samwell because they take a meandering walk around town before they get back in Nursey’s car so he can drive them home. “Here’s the thing,” Nursey says.

“Oh my God,” Dex huffs. “Are you going to turn me down _again?_ After you flirted with me _all fucking night?_ I don’t know why I fucking fell for it. _Again._ I am such an idiot.”

“No,” Nursey says, panicking. He grabs Dex’s wrist to keep him from storming off. Something twists in Nursey’s chest, because Dex looks honest-to-God _devastated._ “Yes. Listen, we just sat through a speech about sexuality and romantic attracting and I need to say this, okay? So like, I didn’t mean to fuck up that first time. I didn’t really know how to talk about it at that point, I only knew I wanted to touch you but I don’t date. I’m pretty sure I’m ace. I mean, not like Holster or Caitlin who still want to be in love but not have sex, or whatever. I don’t think I do. But I hate it that friends aren’t as important to people as lovers are, and it pisses me off that if I don’t date I don’t think I’ll ever be someone’s priority. It’s why I love C so much. He’s always down to cuddle and I don’t have to put out to make him happy. But — I. I hate feeling so lonely. It’s so hard to get someone to touch you without opening the Pandora’s box of it all, and I feel like no one ever does, except C and sometimes I think I'm taking advantage of him and I'm just. I'm so sick of hating myself about all of this shit.”

It’s dark outside, and the street lamps light Dex weirdly. He looks a bit like an alien, but there’s enough light to know that his eyes are soft.

“Are you done?” Dex asks.

Nursey swallows. “I think so.”

“So to clarify, when you touch me, you’re touching me because you like being close, but you don’t want to date, or kiss or have sex with me,” Dex says, slowly, but he doesn’t sound angry.

“That’s about the measure of it. Except — kissing, maybe? I’m not sure.”

“You’re not sure.”

“I’ve had a few. Not a lot. I’ve only told one person before, and they called me a tease, so I started staying away from potential kisses.”

“Point being,” Dex says, pausing to look at his own scuffed shoes and take a deep breath, “you're not fucking with me, to, I don't know, prove that I'm some sort of closeted republican homophobe and then write an expose about me for The Swallow.”

Nursey recoils. “What the hell, bro. I know we didn't fucking get along all that well last year after, you know, whatever, but I'd never do something like that to you.”

“Alright,” Dex says. 

“Alright?” Nursey asks, still reeling.

“It’s okay to just want to be touched. Normal. You know, like the monkey thing.”

“What’s the monkey thing?”

“You know, where they did the monkey experiment… you know what, let’s go back to my room and we can google it so I don't mess up any of the details.”

“That sounds like a very flimsy excuse,” Nursey says, feeling a little daring.

“It is. We’re going to watch a movie and I’m going to smother you,” Dex deadpans. "I'm going to prioritize you as a friend."

Nursey feels his toes curl inside his shoes.

*

Chowder’s room is practically wallpapered in Shark’s stuff. It’s silly but she’s kind of fond of it now, and of course she’s a fan. But looking at his pinned up posters gives her a wave of nostalgia for something that hasn’t ended yet, like she knows one day she’s going to look back at this time in her life fondly.

“Christopher,” she says, spreading her palms across his back, which is naked down to the waist of his jeans. His shoulders are a work of art.

She lets her thumbs dig into the side of his spine. He’s like a pat of butter beneath her, all his edges blurred.

“Hm?” he says.

“Nothing,” Caitlin smiles, dipping down to put her lips on the back of his neck. “Just like saying it.”

Caitlin is moderately pretty, and she made pretty good friends within the high school athletic community before coming to Samwell. She’s had other boyfriends. She was never stupid enough to be thinking long-term about them, because it’s hard to keep a jock boyfriend for long without having sex with them.

But she’s been with Chris for six months, during which time she’d had more fun than she’s ever had dating. The nice thing is that he lets her talk _about_ sex, which she’s pretty interested in, without assuming that has to translate into something physical, which she isn’t.

She’s not sure if they’ll be together for fifty years (which, idiotically, she’s starting to hope) or if she’ll want to make compromises at some point with him instead of just co-writing reams of silly and erotic texts.

She drifts in thought, dragging her palms down the thick slips of the muscles in his back, until he squirms out from under her.

“Alright, your turn,” he says, as he gets himself upright. Cait leans in to peck him on the mouth, evens up lingering long enough to do it a few times.

“Okay,” she says. “Will it be a problem if I,” she says, touching the hem of her shirt.

“Take off whatever you like,” he says.  
  
“I still won’t— ” she hesitates.

“Duh. I’ve met you before,” he grins at her. He’s fucking _cute._ She knows this. Her boyfriend is cute and sweet and friendly and he cheers like a maniac when he comes to her games, even though volleyball isn’t a well attended sport. He makes her feel safe.

She unbuttons her shirt and lays across his bed on her tummy, eyes already slipping closed.

He kneels next to her, she can feel the weight of him to her side. “You can sit,” she gestures her own hips behind her.

“False,” he says, still sounding cheerful. “I’m super hard right now.”

“Oh,” she says, opening her eyes. “That’s — that’s fine.”

He massages her with strong hands and she can feel the hard press of his cock through his jeans and against the small of her back. She is already imagining this scenario coming up later, in which he makes this scenario terribly interesting.

One day soon, Caitlin thinks, she is going to ask him if it would make him uncomfortable to touch himself while she’s here, because she thinks that might be pretty interesting, too.

*

 _Shits,_ Larissa taps out. _I miss you and I sort of regret —_

She tries again. A few times.

_I want to start a relationship with you but I don’t_

_I don’t know if you still have feelings for me, but_

_Hey I should have told you a long time ago, but I’m not interested in_

_*_

Three months later, Holster texts his relationship group chat.

 _Y’all,_ he says. _IDK if anyone is interested in this bc there is no real precedent but if my penis was theoretically doing The Thing…?_

March texts back immediately: _!!!_

And Ransom: _Coming from Founders, we are going to steal this couple’s tandem bike. OTW@@@@@@_

March also sends a lot of kissy emojis. Holster is, in spite of himself, a little tickled.

**Author's Note:**

> to be clear, he was "sir not appearing in this fic" because this is a poc challenge so i wanted to only deal with the interracial couples (which is almost all of them, damn i love this fandom) but jsyk jack is definitely demi in this fic. title from the song, love is a many-splendored thing, which was made popular by the four aces. heh.


End file.
